Saturday, May 6, 2017

The light show Loyola put on was spectacular. All around the McManus and Humanities area, Loyola's campus was lit with a myriad of beautiful colors. These lights ranged from a whole lot of things, but the two pieces of art that caught my eye most were the big lit up Loyola L and the colored lights on the windows of Sellinger. I have included photos below. The L changed colors every few seconds and it was really cool to see how bright it really was. This is a cool form of modern art with the bright color scheme and using all of the colors on the main color wheel.

Also, the windows on the side of Sellinger that you can see if you are walking to the College Center from the other side of the bridge, were lit up all rainbow. You can see the lights from so far away which I thought was really cool. Like the L, these windows had all of the colors on the wheel, except instead of changing, they always stayed the same colors. All in all, I thought the light show was cool and I can't wait to go again next year!

Thursday, May 4, 2017

I have been studying the Swiss artist, Alberto Giacometti, throughout
the semester and did my final project on him. Giacometti was a surrealist and
existentialist who was known for his skinny sculptures and his simple drawings.
I chose to use his drawing style for my final project. In 1958, Giacometti drew
his “Portrait de Diego”. Giacometti used a black crayon for this portrait and
it honestly looks like he just drew a bunch of lines to create Diego.

I based my project off of this portrait, but instead of one,
I made six Diegos. For each and every portrait I drew, I used a different
writing utensil. The top row (from left to right) was drawn by a colored
pencil, an ebony pencil, and a colored marker. The bottom row (from left to
right) was drawn by a thin sharpie marker, a crayon and a normal pencil. This
gave each portrait a different feeling due to the diverse textures the
different tools were able to create.

Giacometti only used black during his portraits, but I
wanted to modernize it up a little bit by adding slight color. I didn’t want to
go over the top by adding every color on the color wheel, so I stuck with only
blue and alternated between blue and black/gray portraits. Creating almost like
a “checkerboard” feel, the blue definitely spices up the project a little bit
making it more enjoyable to view. This is a monochromatic color scheme because
blue is the only color used, with black/gray complementing it.

The focal point of my project is supposed to be the portrait
in the top middle (the ebony pencil one). I think this because it is the best
looking portrait out of the six in my opinion, so I decided to put that in the
top middle so everyone’s eyes can look at it first and then look around at the
rest of the portraits. Each portrait also takes up about two thirds of the
space on each canvas. It was important to make it more than half to show that
the main part of the drawing is Diego, not the white space behind him. Although
not obviously not 100% perfect, each portrait is symmetrical, so if you were to
cut it in half across the middle, each side should look exactly like its
counterpart. The value of the piece is generally dark, as there are no bright,
fun colors popping out at year. The project keeps to only black and blue.

This was my favorite class out of the five that I took the entire
semester. I have only taken one art class since middle school, so I really did
not know what to expect going into this. I learned about so many different two
dimensional design techniques and even got to learn about an artist all
semester. My favorite part was the satisfaction you felt when you completed a
project; just being able to look at your completed product and be proud that it
is your’s.

If I had to change one thing about the class or something
that I did not like to much, it would be that there was not enough time for the
projects. I felt like I would stay up late Monday night doing a project due
Tuesday, just to get a new project due for my next class Thursday after I
handed in my Tuesday project. It obviously is not as taxing as, say, studying
for accounting for that much time every week, but there was definitely a lot of
out of class time put into all of the projects. Overall, it was a great class
and the art skills I learned will definitely help me in the business world to
make me become a great marketer.